Nora Stuart

Nora Stuart is a woman in her mid-to-late twenties who, at the beginning of the book, works as a gastroenterologist at Boston City Hospital. Nora has undergone several transformations in her life. As a child, she was close with her father and wore her wild hair in braids, but once her father abandoned her she experienced skin problems, gained weight, and her hair grew in brown and course (“not quite curly, not quite straight” (30)). Through her high school years Nora had bad posture and low self-confidence. At the end of high school, however, Nora earned a scholarship to Tufts, and she changed her life, losing weight by eating correctly and exercising, making friends, and graduating magna cum laude. After college, Nora went to medical school, after which she chose gastroenterology as a specialty because it was an area of medicine where there were few fatalities.

In the...